“Why is it that I have to die here like a cat or a dog … without any reason, without any meaning?”

It was an extraordinary act of defiance, and it was extraordinarily risky. But all he did was take out a pen, and write.

Nearly 40 years ago, hunched on the floor of the wood-and-leaf hut he was forced to live in away from his children, Cambodian school inspector Poch Younly kept a secret diary vividly recounting the horrors of life under the Khmer Rouge, the radical communist regime whose extreme experiment in social engineering took the lives of 1.7 million Cambodians from overwork, medical neglect, starvation and execution.